Video: Batching two actions into one

All right, I think you're going to be fairly blown away by this exercise. We're going to take that Size stroke & SFW action that we recorded in the previous exercise, and we'll combine it with Convert to CMYK, to create one overarching uber action that's capable of taking an entire folder full of images and converting them into CMYK files in one folder and web-ready JPGs in another, all by itself, without any intervention from you. So for starters, if you're working along with me inside this Arles Amphitheatre.psd image, you need to go ahead and restore the image to its original appearance. And you do that, of course, by going out to the File menu and choosing the Revert command, or press the F12 key.

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Batching two actions into one

All right, I think you're going to be fairly blown away by this exercise.We're going to take that Size stroke & SFW action that we recorded in theprevious exercise, and we'll combine it with Convert to CMYK, to create oneoverarching uber action that's capable of taking an entire folder full of imagesand converting them into CMYK files in one folder and web-ready JPGs inanother, all by itself, without any intervention from you.So for starters, if you're working along with me inside this ArlesAmphitheatre.psd image, you need to go ahead and restore the image to itsoriginal appearance. And you do that, of course, by going out to the File menuand choosing the Revert command, or press the F12 key.

And now we're looking at just a fragment of this larger, layered image, that isthe one Smart Object with variations applied as a Smart Filter.All right, now let's create a new action.Now I want to be able to see the actions that we're joining, but this guy righthere, CMYK + adjustable sharpen, it's just cluttering up the panel the way it is,so I'm going to twirl it closed.All right, now let's create a new action, and I'll do so by clicking on the Pageicon, which because Size stroke & SFW was selected, and it's part of theProductivity set, Photoshop is inviting me to put the new action inside theproductivity set as well.

And I'm going to call this guy "Web & CMYK," because that's the order we're goingto work in, and it will become evident why I chose this shortly. But for nowjust go ahead and give it that name. Click Record.We've got a new action.Now we're going to need to play these two actions one after the other, but wealso need to reset the image in between.So we need to create a reset point, and we're going to do that inside the History panel.First, note that we are recording the action,so the round record button is red.I'll switch over to the History panel, and I'm going to drop down to the littlecamera icon, and I'm going to Alt+click on it or Option+click on it on the Mac.

It's very important that you Alt+click or Option+click because we need to namethis snapshot. And I'm going to call it coda, so that we know it's something thatwe can come back to later.It doesn't matter if it's called coda, but it needs to have a name, then click OK.Now go back to the Actions panel, and if you twirl open this new step, whichis called Make snapshot, notice it's called coda, and so we can come back to it later.All right. Now, the next step is to play Size stroke & SFW.

So go ahead and click on that action in order to make it active, and then clickthe Play button, and notice Photoshop plays through those steps, but it doesn'trecord each and every step.It just goes ahead and records Play action Size stroke & SFW of set Productivity.So in other words, that action has to be here, inside the Productivity set forthis new action to work.The good news is if we decide to change the Size stroke & SFW action, then thosechanges will get recorded with our new action as well.All right, now what you suppose we need to do?Well we've just ruined the images for purposes of generating a CMYK, because wewant the CMYK image to have all the pixels, and we just threw away 15 out of 16pixels inside this image.

So we need to reset the image by going back to the History panel and clicking on coda.That's all it takes, just click on it.Now, go back to the Actions panel, and it even says Select snapshot "Coda," so byvirtue of the fact that we call the coda here, and we come back to it here, everypiece that's needed is here inside this one action. All right.The final step is to go up to Convert to CMYK and then click the Play button for it.Alternatively, by the way, you can take advantage of that keyboard trick;you could Ctrl+double-click or Command+double-click on that action.

It'll play through, and it's gets recorded as Play action Convert to CMYK of set Productivity.So as long as you keep all these actions together inside this set, you're A-okay.And I'll show you how to save off your actions to preserve them in a futureexercise, but for now, we're done;just go ahead and click on the square Stop button at the bottom of the Actionspanel in order to save off that action, and it is now well-finished. All right.Let's check it out.Let's make sure it works.So I'm going to go ahead and close this image, here inside of Photoshop.

And it didn't ask me to save the changes, because the last thing I did was saveit off as a TIFF image.I'll go up to the Bridge icon, here in the Applications Bar to switch to the Bridge.I'm going to go into the Web Imagery folder, and there you should findyour Arles-Amphitheatre.jpg file, just one copy of it, even though we created it twice:once in the last exercise and once just nowin this exercise, one saved over the other.So actions will automatically save overall files.Go ahead and press Ctrl+Delete or Command+ Delete on a Mac in order to get rid of that file.

Then click on the subfolder CMYK for print.Press Ctrl+A, Command+A on a Mac to select all those images.Press Ctrl+Delete or Command+Delete to get rid of them as well.So don't get rid of the files inside of Original wide-formats, but we aregetting rid of the files inside CMYK for print and Web Imagery, and then click onOriginal wide-formats to select that folder.Go up to the Tools menu, choose Photoshop, and choose Batch.And this time around, once you've switched in the Photoshop, I want you to makesure your Set is that to Productivity,Action is Web & CMYK - that action we've just recorded,Source is the Bridge so we're opening all of the images from the Bridge.

You don't have to worry about any of these check boxes below.Destination is Save and Close.So it's just going to follow the save instructions that are part of the actions.That's why CMYK had to come last.Because otherwise, the last thing that Save and Close is going to do is save thefile right before it closes.And if we just got on downsampling file for the web, and then we're going tosave off those changes to the TIFF file, that's going to kill the TIFF files.And they won't be CMYK TIFF files either; they will be RGBs.So what we need to do is make sure to save off those web graphics first, becausethat's all handled by Save for Web, which is treated as an export command,and then come back to the original image, Coda, generate those TIFF files, and save them out.

So Destination should be Save and Close.Nothing else needs to be changed.Do not turn on Override Action Save As Commands.That would be bad, because that would save the TIFF images to that exact sameOriginal wide-formats folder.Go ahead and click OK.Every one of the 15 files should open.You should see the various steps inside the Actions panel flit by.We're going to fast-forward through the process to the very end and show you whatthese images look like in the Bridge.And then once you see that green image come up, the one with the foliage on theside of the building, then you know you're on your last file.

Once it disappears, you can click on the Bridge icon to switch back to theBridge, and now check out the Web Imagery folder.It should have 15 different JPG files in it, all of which are 590x260 pixels, at 72 ppi.Even though we didn't change the resolution inside the Image Size dialog box,the Save For Web command did.Then switch over to CMYK for print subfolder, which we just got done emptying,and there are all of our TIFF files, as well.So everything is right ready to go, one big huge batch operation pulled offusing an action that encapsulated two other action, here inside Photoshop.

Learn by watching, listening, and doing, Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along Premium memberships include access to all exercise files in the library.

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Learn by watching, listening, and doing! Exercise files are the same files the author uses in the course, so you can download them and follow along. Exercise files are available with all Premium memberships.
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